Five short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and still a whole relationship seems to pass through them: its habits, its flaws, and what looks like its fading light. Dave Bonta's "Language of love" takes a subject that usually invites floods of words and spends almost nothing on it. The first line states the rule, "we loved in the fewest words", and the rest of the poem obeys it.
The title promises a language, but what follows is a language of scarcity. The past tense of "loved" makes the scene feel remembered, perhaps finished. The speaker looks back on a love conducted with as little speech as possible, and the poem suggests this economy was not simple tenderness. Two single-word lines follow, and both are strange. "Fickly" is a rare adverb, a cousin of "fickle" that most of us would never think to use. "Demandable" is stiff and almost legalistic, meaning something that can be claimed or called for. Side by side, they sketch a love that was changeable and needy at once. They don't match grammatically either: one is an adverb, the other an adjective. Does "fickly" describe how they loved, while "demandable" describes the lovers, or the love itself? The poem never settles it. The looseness is part of the effect, because these are the "fewest words" laid out like objects on a table, each asked to do more work than a word normally does.
The form reinforces this. There is a three-line stanza and a two-line one, with no rhyme and no steady metre. The first line has a loose three-beat pulse, "we LOVED in the FEWest WORDS", and then the single-word lines slow everything down. Each gets a line to itself, with silence above and below it. White space becomes part of the vocabulary, and the reader has to sit through the pauses the lovers sat through. Sound holds the lines together where rhyme does not. The f of "fewest" returns in "fickly", a soft, breathy consonant that feels close to whispering, and it comes back once more in "full" at the very end.
The second stanza turns from character to body. "Loath to speak with one mouth" seems to echo the common phrase "speak with one voice", meaning to agree. Swapping "voice" for "mouth" makes the idea physical, and a mouth does more than speak. It kisses, it eats, it stays closed. "Loath" means reluctant, so the couple would not merge into a single voice and kept their separateness even in intimacy. A second reading is possible too: "one mouth" might simply be one person's mouth, held back from saying what it could. The poem leaves both options open.
Then comes the only fully sensory line, "red and full of evening". After a run of abstract words, the poem hands us colour and light. The red could belong to lips, to wine, or to a sky at sunset, and the phrase "full of evening" lets all of these blur together. Evening is the part of the day when things wind down, so the line carries a sense of ending without announcing one. A mouth "full" of evening is also a mouth full of unsaid things, as though the silence has weight and colour. The rhythm helps. The line ends on the unstressed "-ing" of "evening" and trails away like the last of the light.
The poem matters because it makes its own form its argument. It does not tell us that silence can be a kind of speech. It shows us a poem so compressed that the gaps do the talking. Its picture of love is also unsentimental. It is wary, unstable and a little demanding, and it is beautiful anyway, in the dusky image where the words finally stop. For a student, it is a good example of how much a poem can do with very little. Every word was chosen over another, and the choices that look odd, like "fickly" and "demandable", are the ones that make you slow down and read again.